Dr. Bill Hibbard

Bill
Hibbard, Ph.D.
is a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science
and
Engineering Center working on visualization and machine intelligence.
He is now primarily involved with the
SSEC Machine Intelligence Project.

Bill
is principal author of the
Vis5D,
Cave5D, and
VisAD open source
visualization systems. Vis5D was the first open source 3-D visualization
system and is the leading system for animated 3-D visualization of
weather simulations. Cave5D is the most widely used software system for
scientific visualization in immersive virtual reality. VisAD is the
leading visualization system written in Java.

He is also author of the book
Super-Intelligent Machines and
several articles about the Singularity. His book describes how
new technologies of life and mind will develop during the twenty first
century and can bring great benefits to humans. He warns that these
technologies also threaten to bring radical inequality to human society,
and that this threat must be resisted by educating the public about
these technologies and building a widespread political movement to
protect general human interests. He makes the case that humans
will create machines with much greater than human intelligence during
the twenty first century. He argues that reinforcement learning is
essential to intelligence and that the reinforcement values necessary
for this learning are just what we call emotions. He also explains
how super-intelligent machines can be a great benefit or a great threat
to humans, and says that designing machines with the emotion of love for
all humans is the key to getting the benefit and avoiding the threat.
He also discusses the prospect of humans themselves becoming
super-intelligent.